THE CURRENT CINEMA MEN OF MYSTER.Y "II Divo" and "The Limits of Control " BY ANTHONY LANE , ]{ That kind of man reads a mystery V V story but rips out the page on which the villain is about to be un- masked? Who, in other words, prefers eternal suspense to the vulgar éclat of resolution? The answer, according to "II Divo," is Giulio Andreotti: seven times Prime Minister of Italy, bedrock of the Christian Democrats, and still a senator, at the age of ninety. As incarnated here, right down to the strangely folded tips of his ears, by Toni Servillo, he seems omnipresent, barely sentient, and quite possibly immortal. The action slides between decades, but, to start with, we join Andreotti at the forging of his final administration, in 1991, with colleagues arriving to pay homage as he gets a shave. The writer and director, Paolo Sorrentino, has fun- perhaps too much-with the arrival of this gang, each of whom has an onscreen title with his nickname. One is "Lemon," another "The Shark," and so on; the master of the nation's finances, a dapper little Machiavel by the name of Paolo Cirino Pomicino (Carlo Buccirosso ), rolls up with a sumptuous beauty on each wing, plainly unbothered by any effect they might have on his rate of inflation. All this softens us up for the unsurpris- ing revelation, later in the film, that An- dreotti was no stranger to the workings of the Mafia. He himself denied that he was ever in the Mob's embrace, but whether or not that was so-and we see him greeted with a kiss by the hoggish capo di capi-matters less to Sorrentino than the aroma of clannishness that wafts through every room in the mansion of I talian society. Whether Andreotti is re- ceiving the plaudits of a delegation from the Vatican, or bestowing coffee and cash on his constituents in saintly reticence, as he does every Sunday, or, weirdest of all, holding court at a dance party, enthroned immobile on a sofa while everybody gy- rates around him, we sense an unspoken rite of conduct that is as clearly under- 80 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 4, 2009 stood, and obeyed, by those in the know as it is walled off to anyone else. As a result, there is much plotting in this movie, but no plot. Now and then, Sorrentino tosses violent events in our path. Some viewers will complain that "II Divo" thickens into opacity at such mo- ments, but, on reflection, 1'm not sure that we are meant to make sense of the furor. murder of men, but Sorrentino, by his own admission, is not a political filmmaker, as Francesco Rosi, or the young Berto- lucci, was. He is more of a choreographer, obsessed with how single gestures, or the slightest motion of the camera, can vouch- safe a precious glimpse into a world of hostility or devotion. If he throws up his hands at the clandestine chaos of the Roman parliament, happy to calibrate its farcical aspects rather than consider its im- plications for the country's governance, well, are there not millions of his fellow- citizens who adopt the same shrug? In any case, the purpose of the clutter is clear. Once piled up and shunted aside, it allows Sorrentino to approach the cen- tral presence of the film. To Italian audi- ences, Toni Servillo is a figure of sub- ,"' ,', _ """- ""-. " \ /,'Jf- ' , ,'-"" í/Ø-"" - =---- _ .:.:JI-:-:..: ,- ':: o ,,?, e' ,;[ / I... 4 ,l;;Jtþ ':'.q ;"/. ?' -- ß?f " L-- f Toni Servillo plays the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. To this day, for instance, nobody has cracked the conundrum of Roberto Calvi, the Vatican-friendly banker found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge, in London, and "II Divo" has no wish to propose its own solution. Instead, Sorrentino films the suspended corpse upside down, so that Si- gnor Calvi is made to float like a bulging balloon on the end of a string. Ai, for the slaughter of Giovanni Falcone, a senior investigator of Mafia activity in Palermo, we are shown his bombed car sailing se- renely through a clear sky, like the bone hurled heavenward in "2001: A Space Odyssey." I felt uneasy with these elegant scenes, as they made aesthetic sport of the stance and variety, the actor-director of a Neapolitan theatre troupe; viewers here know him best as the unflustered (if drug-addicted) businessman in Sor- rentino's 2004 feature, "The Conse- quences of Love," and as the expansively sinful waste merchant in last year's "Go- morrah." He specializes in the affable but unreachable, and his performance as An- dreotti is so ricWy and preposterously en- joyable that you almost feel guilty, at the end, for having savored it to the full, as if you'd spooned too much hare sauce onto your pappardelle. Not that this version of g Andreotti has a grain of hedonism. On ð the contrary, he is one of the few convinc-